A Microcosm public statement, seriously?

I’d much rather tell you about my first adventure with puff pastry, how using vodka for part of the water makes great pastry dough, or how I’m making vegan black eyed peas for the New Year. But, I’m gonna weigh in on this before the end of the year. If you haven’t read this post yet, you catch up. If you are sick of hearing about, please ignore this post.

THIS would never have been on my radar had I not noticed a bunch of hits on my blog from Anarchistnews.org. What’s Anarchistnews.org? I had no idea until I went to the link. Apparently The Microcosm Collective squeaked by Cindy’s deadline to make a public statement about Joe’s history of abuse by 2 days and stuck it in this obscure corner of the internet. Hooray for them. But, as the first reply stated: “Who the fuck are Cindy, Alex, or Joe?” You might not want to read the replies, it might take years off your life or boil your brain, who knows? Who the fuck are Cindy, Alex or Joe, indeed! There is no context or links to anything, it just sits there like a steaming pile of someone’s baggage while people who didn’t know and didn’t care walk by. Not only who the fuck are Cindy, Alex and Joe but who are The Microcosm Collective. There are no names listed.

In an e-mail to me from Cindy a few months ago, she asked me to put this into Brainscan #26 , a zine about all the failed mediation attempts with Joe:

In my statement to Microcosm, I asked that the collective make a statement or that each collective member contact me. When I sent this statement to all the workers listed on the Microcosm website, Joe emailed me and told me that the collective was only 3 people: him, Chris and I think Adam. I found this so disturbing. Especially since Sparky, who was very involved in Microcosm, wasn’t included in this list.

One of the big stumbling blocks in the accountabilty process came when we had emailed some questions to Microcosm workers who’s email addresses I had, and Joe was upset that we had only contacted some of the collective members. He said the collective was him and the people in Portland, the people in Bloomington and the people in Kansas; I think 7 or 8 people in all.

I’m sure there is an official policy on who is collective and who is not, but I would like it to be noted that Joe’s manipulative use of who counts as being a collective member, makes it impossible for me to stick with the demand that each collective member contact me.-Cindy Crabb

I’ll admit, it is nice to be told I was right and be thanked but the statement is so vague and just too little, too late. I feel that if this was truly meant to be a public statement they would have, you know, put it on their own website. Or maybe responded to the echo chamber of blog posts about it or a really novel idea would be to e-mail me, not stash it away on a website that clearly doesn’t care about it.

Edited to say that I don’t know for a fact that this actually from the Microcosm Collective. It does not appear anywhere on their site or anywhere else on the internet. I can’t imagine that it is fake though.

Paul calls 2010 the year that everything broke. So, good riddance! Tomorrow is ONE ONE ONE ONE. I think we wrote a Copy Scams song about that called one one one one! It’s about stealing copies but screaming ONE! ONE! ONE! ONE! tonight might be fun? See you next year.

Nope, wasn’t posted on We Make Zines either. Seriously. It’s ridiculous that they would choose to make their statement there instead of their own website. It’s as if they wanted to appease Cindy/everyone else but didn’t want to say it too loudly.

Hi Alex, I just wanted to say that I think you are awesome and I totally support your efforts. Microcosm recently asked me about stocking one of my zines and after seeing this I have decided against supplying them with any. If you are interested, I write about it on my blog http://sarahtearex.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/boycott-microcosm-support-survivors/ and have included the e-mail response I wrote to Microcosm. If anything I said makes you uncomfortable or if there’s anything you would like to see changed, please let me know. And good luck with the black eyed peas!